Tag: Mali

Wrong, Peace News, Even Political Conflict Hasn’t Stopped Mali from Thriving Amid Climate Change

Peace News ran a story attempting to link political conflict in Mali to extreme weather events, particularly drought and flooding, which it says are caused by climate change. This is false. There are myriad factors contributing to the internal, devastating strife in Mali, but climate change is not among them because the climate has not measurably changed from its historical pattern of repeated droughts punctuated by flooding during irregular rainy seasons.

A large, traditional mud-brick mosque with intricate architecture, surrounded by a sandy landscape and palm trees.

From The Climate Realism

By H. Sterling Burnett

Peace News ran a story attempting to link political conflict in Mali to, particularly drought and flooding, which it says are caused by climate change. This is false. There are myriad factors contributing to the internal, devastating strife in Mali, but climate change is not among them because the climate has not measurably changed from its historical pattern of repeated droughts punctuated by flooding during irregular rainy seasons. Also, despite Mali’s problems, its economy and agricultural sector, which accounts for about 80 percent of the country’s workforce, have grown substantially across the period during which climate change has become a cause of international concern.

According to Peace News’ story, “Combating Climate Change for Peace in Mali:”

Mali is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the world. Between 1970 and 2020, the country experienced at least 40 major climate shocks, with drought affecting around 400,000 people each year and reducing crop revenues by US$9.5 million annually, according to the World Bank.

In Mali, climate change is a major factor in conflict, according to an August 2025 report by the UN Sustainable Development Group. Due to the degradation of grazing lands from declining soil fertility, the report says, farmers are expanding their cultivation into traditional herding routes. This has led to violent conflicts between farmers and herders.

Almost every statement made in those two paragraphs is false or misleading. First, to understand if climate change has affected Mali significantly, one must understand its geography and climate history. Mali is now and has historically been an extremely arid country, lying along the thermal equator in the region commonly referred to as the torrid zone. It is among the hottest countries in the world with the Southern Sahara Desert dominating the vast majority of its territory. In recent decades, Mali’s temperatures have not appreciably increased, so warming can’t be driving any changes in extreme weather.

In fact, evidence suggests that Mali, like the Earth in general, has greened extensively during the recent period of climate change with hundreds of square miles of the Sahara Desert in the country being reclaimed by vegetation, both crops intentionally planted and forests and grasslands naturally springing up (see the image, below).

Global map illustrating changes in leaf area from 1982 to 2015, showcasing percentage increases and decreases in various regions. Color gradient indicates levels of change, with purple representing a decrease of over 30% and green indicating increases of over 50%.
This image shows the change in leaf area across the globe from 1982-2015 detected by satellite. Credits: Boston University/R. Myneni. Image source: NASA

Any conflicts between herders and farmer in Mali is due to land now becoming suitable for farming that wasn’t previously, and the lack of secure property rights – an institutional failure of government – for the herders.

To the extent that some areas have declining soil fertility, that is due to the types of cash crops that dominate in Mali. Cotton, Mali’s top cash crop, is a mineral and water intensive crop to grow. Decades of monocropping cotton depletes the soil. If minerals are not added back through the application of modern fertilizers, traditional fertilizes, or by rotating crops, the soil becomes depleted. Absent secure, defined, and legally defensible property rights, farmers are likely to move on to more fertile ground. In Mali, this is common, creating conflict. But climate change is not the cause of this.

Both droughts and periodic floods have been common throughout Mali’s history, including during the 1960s and 1970s when carbon dioxide concentrations and the global average temperature were both lower than today. The Peace News article presents no evidence or data indicating either type of weather-related event have become more frequent or severe in recent years because they haven’t.

Finally, the hard data about Mali’s agricultural and economic growth refutes claims that recent climate change has left Mali’s population worse off.

Mali’s main crops have all increased significantly. Thus, it is not surprising that because 80 percent of Mali’s workforce is involved with agriculture, the country’s GDP has grown dramatically over the past 30 years.

Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that in Mali, from 1994 to 2024, amid global warming:

  • Groundnut production (primarily peanuts) has increased by more than 131 percent.
  • Maize production has grown by approximately 1,126 percent.
  • Mango production has expanded by more than 3,604 percent.
  • Cotton production has increased by about 87 percent.
  • Millet production had grown by a little more than 1,211 percent; and
  • Sorghum production has improved by nearly 1,199 percent. (see the figure, below)
Graph showing the production trends of various crops including maize, millet, sorghum, and others from 1994 to 2022, with distinct colored lines representing each crop type.

The point is that not a single top agricultural crop grown in Mali for either domestic consumption or for commercial sale has seen a decline in production, despite the normal ups and downs of Mali’s seasons of drought and floods.

Largely due to improved agricultural production, although mining plays a role as well, the World Bank reports that Mali’s GDP growth has been dramatic in recent decades. (see the graphs, below).

GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2021 international $) – Mali

Line graph displaying the trend of a data set from 1990 to 2024, showing an overall increase from around 1.9 to nearly 2.9 thousand.
International Comparison Program (ICP), World Bank (WB), url: worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data.

Or

GDP per capita, PPP (current international $) – Mali

Line graph showing an upward trend from 1990 to 2024, with values in thousands for Mali.
International Comparison Program ( ICP ), World Bank ( WB ), url: worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data.

Any way one measures Mali’s economic performance, it shows substantial growth during recent decades that media outlets have constantly proclaimed to be the warmest on record.

In the end, Peace News couldn’t see the forest for the trees, focusing on anecdotal claims of hardship attributed to climate change, when the larger data set shows substantial economic progress benefitting the people of Mali. The author of Peace News’ article, Tara Abhasakun, evidently couldn’t be bothered to look beyond the narrative she had created that climate change was causing strife and conflict in Mali. She should have checked the facts on the ground, specifically: Mali’s geography, climatic history, internal politics, and data on crop production and economic growth. Perhaps a story this light on facts is not surprising coming from an outlet dedicated to a cause: in this case the noble cause of peace. One can agree with the goal, without jettisoning the truth.

The BBC and Guardian Have Been Raising the Alarm About ‘Deadly’ Heatwaves in Mali and Burkina Faso, Despite Little Rise in Average Temperatures in the Last 85 Years

Legacy media filled its columns last week with poppycock ‘attribution’ stories suggesting that recent heatwaves in Mali (the hottest country in the world), Burkina Faso and the rest of the Sahel would have been impossible without human-caused climate disruption. Needless to say, a number of important facts were missing from this latest bout of climate catastrophism.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Legacy media filled its columns last week with poppycock ‘attribution’ stories suggesting that recent heatwaves in Mali (the hottest country in the world), Burkina Faso and the rest of the Sahel would have been impossible without human-caused climate disruption. Needless to say, a number of important facts were missing from this latest bout of climate catastrophism. Average temperatures in both Mali and Burkina Faso have barely risen in the last 85 years, rainfall in both countries has increased slightly in recent times, agricultural production is up, while de-desertification is under way across the entire Sahel region.

This last fact is never likely to be mentioned in these footling stories dreamed up to promote Net Zero collectivisation. To do so would be to open a Pandora’s Box showing global plant levels have accelerated due to the recovering levels of carbon dioxide in a previously denuded atmosphere. A recent science paper revealed that over the last two decades, plant growth had accelerated over large areas of the planet. During the last 40 years, it is thought that there has been 14% more plant growth, bringing immeasurable benefits for local biodiversity as well as more food for human consumption.

The above illustration shows the boost to the natural world over just the last 20 years. Big increases in leaf growth are reported across India, Europe, Brazil and significant parts of Africa. The growth across the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert can be clearly seen.

None of this seems to attract the interest of activists writing in the mainstream media, seemingly concerned only to fear monger and push populations to embrace the insanity of Net Zero. The Guardian wrote of a protracted heatwave in the Sahel that “filled hospitals and mortuaries”. Matt McGrath of the BBC reported a claim that additional heat “would have been the difference between life and death for many people”. Both media operations were reporting the findings of World Weather Attribution (WWA), an operation partly funded by green billionaire Jeremy Grantham, that the “deadly heatwave” would have been “impossible” without humans ratcheting up the climate thermostat.

Regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware of the model-driven crystal ball gazing of WWA. The service produces pseudoscientific opinions, but fails the test of the scientific process since its claims cannot be falsified. Further details are available here. Despite this lack of scientific rigour, the service provides useful ‘scientists say’ cover for legacy media in their Net Zero work.

Both the BBC and the Guardian picked up on the claim by WWA that the temperature rose above 48oC in the Mali city of Kayes on April 3rd, with the Guardian claiming the 48.5oC was the hottest day ever recorded in the country. Some doubt on this figure us cast by the data below provided by Time and Date.

According to this data, April 3rd saw a 44oC high, which was over four degrees lower than the claimed record, and this dropped away two days later to 41oC. As we have seen across the world, the collection of surface temperature data is subject to numerous corruptions. In the U.K., the Met Office compiles nearly 80% of its data from stations that have ‘uncertainties’ set by the World Meteorological Office of between 2-5oC. WWA states that “extreme five day maximum heat as rare as the observed event over Mali/Burkina Faso would have been between 1.5oC cooler and 1.4oC cooler over the larger Sahel region if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels”. Quite where such precision comes from is anyone’s guess, including, it might be suggested, the computer wizards claiming their garbage-in-gospel-out models can unlock the mysteries of a chaotic atmosphere.

Away from the elites catastrophising about the weather for domestic political purposes, the countries of the Sahel including Burkina Faso and Mali have actually enjoyed a remarkably stable climate over the last 85 years.

Both Burkina Faso and Mali show similar average temperature trends and in common with many countries near the equator recent warming has been much less than territories further north. In fact, a large spike during the 1930s, presumably unrelated to humans burning hydrocarbons, was followed by an 85-year pause with little or no warming. The five year 2022 smoothed average temperature of 29.57oC in Burkina Faso, shown above in a World Bank climate graph, is almost exactly the same as that recorded in 1938. In Mali, the temperature difference between these two years is just 0.2oC.

Of course rainfall is very important, and in both countries precipitation amounts have risen in recent years. In Burkina Faso, annual amounts rose from 798.04 mm in the period 1961-1990 to 831.07 mm in 1991-2020, while in Mali the rise over the same period was 313.7 mm to 328.93 mm. Meanwhile, in the course of the BBC story, it is claimed that Senegal is seeing “decreasing rainfall as a result of climate change”. Not according to World Bank figures which show an annual rise in precipitation from 707.87 mm in 1961-1990 to 722.91 mm in the latest 30-year period.

Overall then, the great story missing from the headlines is that the Sahel is slowly turning green. A few thousand years ago the Sahara desert was full of vegetation. Natural process and climate change turned it into a desert, a process that can easily go into reverse. The desert has shown a greener image over the last 15 years notes Britannica with heavier summer rainfalls reported. “This is a blessing for the desert as the vegetation recovers,” it notes. Sub-Saharan Africa is a difficult place to make a living on the land. The area needs aid in the form of inorganic fertilisers to improve the soil and hydrocarbon power to boost productivity. But more rain from the heavens and higher levels of CO2 all have a part to play. What it really doesn’t need is the BBC and the Guardian spreading nonsense stories inspired by green billionaires about the mortuaries filling up because hot countries have a few hot days.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.